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Samsung remotely disables TVs looted from South African warehouse

news.samsung.com

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Re: Samsung remotely disables TVs looted from South African warehouse

#281

Post by myaccounthaha »

ceejayoz wrote: post #182
rangerelf wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never again will I buy anything Samsung. They have steadfastly refused to fix my fridge's ice maker even though they have admitted it's a design fault, and retailers will not take it back as faulty because the ice maker is not considered vital to the functioning of the refrigerator in general.

I won't buy appliances anywhere other than Costco for this reason. No-questions-asked returns for 90 days on appliances, and a year on most other items. Extended warranty for several years for free if you use their credit card, too.

Yeah but good luck getting them delivered in the first place. My understanding is that Costco owns Innovel now and they are a truly terrible logistics company. Buyer beware!

Re: Samsung remotely disables TVs looted from South African warehouse

#282

Post by ollien »

mminer237 wrote: post #179
ollien wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously that's not the point, here. The fact that Samsung has the ability to brick a TV remotely _at all_ is ridiculous. It's not hard to imagine this being used by an attacker to shut down all Samsung TVs remotely, or for planned obsolescence if you want to be more cynical.

That would be about as huge of a security failure as an attacker sending out a malicious OS update for any other device, except with a planned, controlled way to disable TVs, Samsung could reenable them promptly once they realize. Intentionally disabling purchased devices to force them to buy new ones is called trespass to chattels and is illegal.

> Intentionally disabling purchased devices to force them to buy new ones is called trespass to chattels and is illegal.

You've never seen any IoT devices shut down remotely? It happens all the time.

Re: Samsung remotely disables TVs looted from South African warehouse

#283

Post by hellbannedguy »

nicolas_t wrote: post #113
ok123456 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Samsung's appliances have a pretty bad reputation in general, especially the refrigerators and side loading washing machines.

Anecdotal but I've had very good experience with Samsung front loading washing machine, might depend on regions of the world though, I've had one in Asia and one in Europe.

Try to stay away from pricy Bosh washers, and dishwashers.

I can offer this with a Bosh. If you get a E13 error it's the pump.

It's a pretty easy fix. You can get a generic pump for $50.

Most disguarded Bosh washers are due to a pump. The computer is second on the list. It's not worth fixing if it's the board.

I've been meaning to put a fan on my washer's computer board. There us definitely room in there for a computer fan.

Re: Samsung remotely disables TVs looted from South African warehouse

#284

Post by rootusrootus »

walrus01 wrote: post #214
wait_a_minute wrote: post #36

I bought one of Samsung's smart televisions a couple years ago. I think I paid $1500 for it. Anyway, it started showing me ads and the TV eventually became sluggish less than a month after owning it. Returned it as defective. Ever since that experience, I swore of all smart televisions and will never buy another Samsung television or smartphone again if I can help it.

I bought a high-end Samsung smart TV in 2017 and simply never gave it the wifi password and never connected it to ethernet. I use it as a dumb screen connected to two consoles and a living room PC for movies. Thankfully we're not yet at the point where my xbox one or PS4 will give it a DHCP lease, NAT and default route/gateway outbound and 100Mbps ethernet over the HDMI cable .

> simply never gave it the wifi password

That's been my strategy too, and so far, so good. We treat the TV as dumb. Getting a 75 inch screen that isn't a 'smart TV' is dang near impossible.

Re: Samsung remotely disables TVs looted from South African warehouse

#285

Post by alerighi »

gotostatement wrote: post #136

I don't own a smart TV because every smart TV I've used has been in an airbnb and they are generally sluggish to the point of being unusable. Even my plug-in Roku has gotten to this point. I don't understand what it could be. Memory leaks? It's totally bizarre

Planned obsolescence. We should really make that practice illegal at some point... but we are too busy imposing people to get rid of they perfectly reliable 20 years old petrol cars to buy crappy new electric cars that will break for a software update and will end up in a landfill...

Re: Samsung remotely disables TVs looted from South African warehouse

#286

Post by rad_gruchalski »

ketralnis wrote: post #238
rad_gruchalski wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you otherwise prove an ownership of an item you have purchased?

Lots of ways. My renters insurance just wants a timestamped digital photo

Cool. Unfortunately not every country works the same.

Re: Samsung remotely disables TVs looted from South African warehouse

#287

Post by arduinomancer »

This thread feels very...Hacker News Bubble?

Why is everyone so confused that smart TVs are popular?

Being able to just turn on your TV and open Netflix without messing around with inputs/other devices is a huge benefit for non-technological people.

And it probably costs <$50 for the manufacturer to include whatever chip is running linux in the TV, its a no-brainer.

Re: Samsung remotely disables TVs looted from South African warehouse

#288

Post by speeder »

ren_engineer wrote: post #50

forget smart TVs, I want somebody to just make a decent dumb TV. Same thing goes for cars, I feel like there is a huge market for "dumb" products. Manufacturers feel the need to keep adding features for some reason

For cars stuff is even harder now.

EU for example has regulations that make mandatory for all new cars to come with tracking devices and logging of what you do with the car.

EDIT: just remembered the name of one of such things. It is "eCall", now mandatory on EU. It mandates all cars must have GPS, Galileo, microphone, logging, cellphone transmitter, and be able to detect a serious emergency happened and call the police automatically and provide them with all data needed.

Seemly removing that crap from the car is illegal too. (I don't live in EU right now so I didn't dove too deep in that subject).

Re: Samsung remotely disables TVs looted from South African warehouse

#290

Post by mattmcknight »

lostlogin wrote: post #257
lotsofpulp wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Samsung and LG are so big that I would not expect to be able to make an objective statement on either's quality relative to another, not even for a specific product line, much less company wide.

Doesn’t a larger sample size reduce the noise?

I think the issue is that both companies make very cheap and very expensive products in various places around the globe. So, we could be reading series of negative comments from people that got an inexpensive model made in Mexico versus people that got an expensive one made in Korea, or something like that.
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